When I was in grad school, I wrote my thesis on branding in mergers and acquisitions. I thought I was pretty cutting-edge back then. Companies simply weren’t thinking too deeply about branding and as more and more companies were merging. They weren’t taking the brands into consideration and often ended up with a number of disparate brands or trying to force brands together – confusing everyone in their path.

Since then, I’ve paid close attention to branding. Not just the evolution of company brands, but how customers are reacting, shaping and demanding what a brand is. How do you manage that?

We used to equate branding with trust. Who are you? What do you do? And Why should I care? Answer those questions and then deliver on your answers. But it’s really more complicated than that. In this digital age, audiences are savvier and more demanding:  “tell me what I want to know, when I want to know it… and say it how I understand it.”

So much for consistency of message. So much for simply repeating what you as a company want the public to know and think.

Let’s boil this down a little further. I was recently reading an article from Adam Morgan of Admap about brands and “three dimensions of trust.” The author broke it down as follows:

Competence: What is the company’s core expertise.

Intent: What motivates the company? Where does this company stand? An, honest job for an honest price, for example, could be your company’s intent.

Character: Who am I working with? Will they make things right if I am unhappy with the deliverable?

I like the idea of considering trust as three-dimensional. We should always circle back to these dimensions of trust when defining our brand. In doing so, a business stands a much better chance of developing communications and materials that get through the sea of clutter and confusion.

Branding is about to get a resurgence of sorts, because it’s not as simple as it once was. There are so many media channels and so many ways to reach out to people. We deal with complicated audience profiling and clusters, constant dialogue and feedback… I learned branding as simplification for ease of customer choice. I like that. I get that. But maybe now, branding should be simplification and trust for ease of customer choice through communications efforts, multi-media and digital dialogue.

If you embark on a brand strategy for your company, be sure and take the time to define what the three dimensions of trust mean to your company. It’s an important and worthwhile exercise. Then start to consider how that manifests itself in your day-to-day operations, including internal and external communications.